Mr. Howller told Jill about the two men, and she said, “What about them, Grandpa?”
“I don’t really know,” he said. “Often I’ve wondered... well, never mind. Whoever they were, they’re irrelevant to what happened to King Kong. But I’ll say one thing about New York—you sure see a lot of strange characters there.”
Young Howller had expected that the mess would quickly be cleaned up. And it was true that the Sanitation Department had sent a big truck with a big crane and a number of men with hoses, scoop shovels, and brooms. But a dozen people at least stopped the cleanup almost before it began. Carl Denham wanted no one to touch the body except the taxidermists he had called in. If he couldn’t exhibit a live Kong, he would exhibit a dead one. A colonel from Roosevelt Field claimed the body, and, when asked why the Air Force wanted it, could not give an explanation. Rather, he refused to give one, and it was not until an hour later that a phone call from the White House forced him to reveal the real reason. A general wanted the skin for a trophy because Kong was the only ape ever shot down in aerial combat.
A lawyer for the owners of the Empire State Building appeared with a claim for possession of the body. His clients wanted reimbursement for the damage done to the building.
A representative of the transit system wanted Kong’s body so it could be sold to help pay for the damage the ape had done to the Sixth Avenue Elevated.
The owner of the theater from which Kong had escaped arrived with his lawyer and announced he intended to sue Denham for an amount which would cover the sums he would have to pay to those who were inevitably going to sue him.
The police ordered the body seized as evidence in the trial for involuntary manslaughter and criminal negligence in which Denham and the theater owner would be defendants in due process.
The manslaughter charges were later dropped, but Denham did serve a year before being paroled. On being released, he was killed by a religious fanatic, a native brought back by the second expedition to Kong’s island. He was, in fact, the witch doctor. He had murdered Denham because Denham had abducted and slain his god, Kong.
His Majesty’s New York consul showed up with papers which proved that Kong’s island was in British waters. Therefore, Denham had no right to anything removed from the island without permission of His Majesty’s government.
Denham was in a lot of trouble. But the worst blow of all was to come next day. He would be handed notification that he was being sued by Ann Redman. She wanted compensation to the tune of ten million dollars for various physical indignities and injuries suffered during her two abductions by the ape, plus the mental anguish these had caused her. Unfortunately for her, Denham went to prison without a penny in his pocket, and she dropped the suit. Thus, the public never found out exactly what the “physical indignities and injuries” were, but this did not keep it from making many speculations. Ann Redman also sued John Driscoll, though for a different reason. She claimed breach of promise. Driscoll, interviewed by a newsman, made his famous remark that she should have been suing Kong, not him. This convinced most of the public that what it had suspected had indeed happened. Just how it could have been done was difficult to explain, but the public had never lacked wiseacres who would not only attempt the difficult but would not draw back even at the impossible.
Actually, Mr. Howller thought, the deed was not beyond possibility. Take an adult male gorilla who stood six feet high and weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. According to Swiss zoo director Ernst Lang, he would have a full erection only two inches long. How did Professor Lang know this? Did he enter the cage during a mating and measure the phallus? Not very likely. Even the timid and amiable gorilla would scarcely submit to this type of handling in that kind of situation. Never mind. Professor Lang said it was so, and so it must be. Perhaps he used a telescope with gradations across the lens like those on a submarine’s periscope. In any event, until someone entered the cage and slapped down a ruler during the action, Professor Lang’s word would have to be taken as the last word.
By mathematical extrapolation, using the square-cube law, a gorilla twenty feet tall would have an erect penis about twenty-one inches long. What the diameter would be was another guess and perhaps a vital one, for Ann Redman anyway. Whatever anyone else thought about the possibility, Kong must have decided that he would never know unless he tried. Just how well he succeeded, only he and his victim knew, since the attempt would have taken place before Driscoll and Denham got to the observation tower and before the searchlight beams centered on their target.
But Ann Redman must have told her lover, John Driscoll, the truth, and he turned out not to be such an understanding man after all.
“What’re you thinking about, Grandpa?”
Mr. Howller looked at the screen. The Roadrunner had been succeeded by the Pink Panther, who was enduring as much pain and violence as the poor old coyote.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just watching the Pink Panther with you.”
“But you didn’t say what happened to King Kong,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “we stood around until dawn, and then the big shots finally came to some sort of agreement. The body just couldn’t be left there much longer, if for no other reason than that it was blocking traffic. Blocking traffic meant that business would be held up. And lots of people would lose lots of money. And so Kong’s body was taken away by the Police Department, though it used the Sanitation Department’s crane, and it was kept in an icehouse until its ownership could be thrashed out.”
“Poor Kong.”
“No,” he said, “not poor Kong. He was dead and out of it.”
“He went to heaven?”
“As much as anybody,” Mr. Howller said.
“But he killed a lot of people, and he carried off that nice girl. Wasn’t he bad?”
“No, he wasn’t bad. He was an animal, and he didn’t know the difference between good and evil. Anyway, even if he’d been human, he would’ve been doing what any human would have done.”
“What do you mean, Grandpa?”
“Well, if you were captured by people only a foot tall and carried off to a far place and put in a cage, wouldn’t you try to escape? And if these people tried to put you back in, or got so scared that they tried to kill you right now, wouldn’t you step on them?”
“Sure, I’d step on them, Grandpa.”
“You’d be justified, too. And King Kong was justified. He was only acting according to the dictates of his instincts.”
“What?”
“He was an animal, and so he can’t be blamed, no matter what he did. He wasn’t evil. It was what happened around Kong that was evil.”
“What do you mean?” Jill said.
“He brought out the bad and the good in the people.”
But mostly bad, he thought, and he encouraged Jill to forget about Kong and concentrate on the Pink Panther. And as he looked at the screen, he saw it through tears. Even after forty-two years, he thought, tears. This was what the fall of Kong had meant to him.
The crane had hooked the corpse and lifted it up. And there were two flattened-out bodies under Kong; he must have dropped them onto the sidewalk on his way up and then fallen on them from the tower. But how explain the nakedness of the corpses of the man and the woman?
The hair of the woman was long and, in a small area not covered by blood, yellow. And part of her face was recognizable.
Young Tim had not known until then that Uncle Nate had returned from looking for Aunt Thea. Uncle Nate gave a long wailing cry that sounded as if he, too, were falling from the top of the Empire State Building.
A second later young Tim Howller was wailing. But where Uncle Nate’s was the cry of betrayal, and perhaps of revenge satisfied, Tim’s was both of betrayal and of grief for the death of one he had passionately loved with a thirteen-year-old’s love, for one whom the thirteen-year-old in him still loved.
“Grandpa, are there any more King Kongs?”
“No,” M
r. Howller said. To say yes would force him to try to explain something that she could not understand. When she got older, she would know that every dawn saw the death of the old Kong and the birth of the new.
WOLD NEWTON
PREHISTORY
THE KHOKARSA SERIES
KWASIN AND THE BEAR GOD
BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER AND CHRISTOPHER PAUL CAREY
In this tale of the ancient African civilization of Khokarsa, the mad giant Kwasin has returned to the island of his birth after eight long years of exile and has just escaped from the dungeons of the tyrannical King Minruth. Kwasin is a cousin to the hero Hadon, whose adventures are told in the first two novels of the Khokarsa trilogy, Hadon of Ancient Opar (Titan Books, 2013) and Flight to Opar. Both Hadon and Kwasin are descendants of Sahhindar, the Gray-Eyed Archer God, who is also the Khokarsan god of plants, bronze, and Time. Readers of Farmer’s Wold Newton novel Time’s Last Gift (Titan Books, 2012) will likely recognize from the author’s many hints that Sahhindar is an alias of the time traveler John Gribardsun, who, under yet another alias, was also a certain well-known jungle lord of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More importantly, Sahhindar/Gribardsun is a prominent member of the Wold Newton Family, whose genetic relationship to Hadon and Kwasin goes a long way to explaining their almost superhuman abilities and deeds. What follows is one of Kwasin’s stranger adventures, which fits chronologically between the first and second chapters of the concluding novel of the Khokarsa trilogy, The Song of Kwasin, by Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey.
When Kwasin crawled from the tiny fishing boat and began hauling it up the sandy slope, he did not know he trod upon the City of the Snake. If he had, he thought later, he might have rowed back out to sea as quickly as his great muscles could carry him, eager to face the boatload of Minruth’s sailors headlong rather than risk disturbing the demons and spirits rumored to haunt this place.
But then again, he was Kwasin, defiler of the Temple of Kho. Even the fact that the Goddess had cursed the grounds of these timeworn ruins might not have been enough to give him pause. Still, in his heart, he had never forsaken Kho, even when the oracle had cast him from civilization and doomed him to exile in the Wild Lands. And secretly he knew he could not escape the superstitions of his people. Though Kwasin was as brave and free a spirit as any that walked the land, the folktales instilled in him during childhood sometimes spoke with a voice louder than that of his adult rationality.
By the time he had hidden the boat amid the thorny flora that grew along the seaside cliffs, Kwasin was already beginning to have misgivings about his chosen landing site. Looking down the beach to his right he could make out in several places broad and flat outcroppings of granite emerging from the sand at irregular angles. Surely these were the remnants of an ancient quay. Farther up the slope shadows arched eastward from vague but towering projections vaulting slantingly in what seemed an unnatural fashion out of the uneven landscape. The shadows were darker emanations within the penumbra of the mountains that rose sharply from the site’s western periphery.
The mountains were the Saasanadar. In order to get to Dythbeth he would either have to go around them by boat along the northern coast of the island or head deeper inland and pass to their south. Both routes carried great risk. Minruth’s forces were everywhere, including on the waters at the mouth of the Gulf of Gahete. Only minutes ago Kwasin had barely escaped the notice of one of the king’s galleys. Or he hoped he had. The bireme had appeared just as Kwasin was rounding the narrow cape that curved into the sea just east of the beach where he had then landed.
His boat now safely hidden, Kwasin sprinted up the slope and into the shadows. Here the land leveled out, although dark, barrowlike mounds rose in places out of the grassy mud and all around him jutted the immense, shadow-spawning projections. A breeze was blowing steadily from the northwest in advance of a storm front. In the distance, lightning flashed, followed a few moments later by a deep booming.
A closer examination of the projections quickly confirmed his suspicions. The giant outcroppings were not natural formations but rather great monoliths of ancient construction, and the drawings carved upon them, though but faintly visible in twilight’s shadow, only heightened his fears about the place.
The symbols on the stones did not resemble modern hieroglyphs. Rather, they were crude, pitted images, graven by primitive hands and likely dating to an era long before Awines invented his syllabary. Some of the petroglyphs depicted Kho as the Bird-Headed Mother; that is, as a steatopygic and large-breasted woman with the head of a fish-eagle. Many of the monuments, however, bore another image: that of a long-fanged serpent coiling tightly as if its deathly embrace meant to draw blood from stone. Everywhere the serpent carvings were surrounded by swarms of spiral pictographs.
He recalled the scribe Hinokly once remarking upon the ancient spiral found in the early stonework of the Klemreskom, the Fish-Eagle People who first populated the island of Khokarsa. The scribe had said Awines had adapted the symbol into the Khokarsan syllabary to represent Kho, in correspondence to the ancient glyph’s original meaning. Then Hinokly had laughed darkly and said that Awines had not wanted the glyph in the syllabary to match too closely the primitive image, so he had altered it, for it was said that he who gazed too long at the deasil spiral would become as the living dead, lost for all eternity enraptured by Great Kho’s terrible beauty.
Kwasin had scoffed at the latter notion, but he told the scribe he had seen similar spiral pictographs carved into the cliffs near where he had lived along the southern sea as a youth. Hinokly had told him the images were doubtless carved there by the aborigines long before the priestess-heroine Lupoeth first explored the region, and their existence so far south was proof that the symbol was ancient indeed.
Kwasin shuddered in the cool shadow of the black stones that rose about him. Were the carvings of the Goddess and clockwise-spinning gyres warnings from Kho to avoid this place or else risk facing the snake demons said to inhabit the ruins?
He did not know, but gazing up at the whorls and slithering creatures decorating the age-old monoliths, he was sure of one thing—he indeed stood among the moldering ruins of fabled Miterisi, the City of the Snake.
Kwasin started as a parrot screeched and flew out at him from behind one of the great columns of stone. He shook his head as if awakening from a trance and forced himself to turn away from the spirals. How long had he been standing here? He could not say for sure, but the scribe’s superstitious yarn about getting lost in the vortex of Kho’s ancient symbol had apparently played upon his ingrained fears about the site.
He cursed. Looking back to the beach, he saw two sailors emerging from a skiff in the shallows. Now they were dragging the craft toward shore. A second skiff—empty—already lay upon the beach, its crew nowhere in sight.
Since he had begun gazing at the stones, the temperature had d ropped several degrees and the breeze from the approaching storm now blew with increasing force. If it had not been for the bird, how much longer would he have stood there unknowing?
Kwasin dropped the thought from his mind and slipped behind the nearest monolith, swearing silently.
For a brief moment he had again felt drawn to stare at the whorls.
He crouched behind the enormous stone and listened. Other than the occasional parrot’s chittering caw, the sea breeze, the occasional clap of thunder, and the surf lapping in the distance, he could hear nothing. He slipped the leather thong of his ax from around his shoulder and relished the comfortable feel of the weapon’s half-petrified antelope-bone handle in his grip. Then he peered from behind the stone.
A sword thrust violently upward from the shadows, sheening in a flash from the heavens. If the lightning had not illuminated the blade, Kwasin might have missed it amid the rapidly diminishing twilight.
He swung his ax. Earthly iron clanked against the meteoritic iron of Kwasin’s weapon. His attacker, whom Kwasin could make out only vaguely in the dimness of the gully
below him, grunted at the blow. Overcome by fury, Kwasin leaped downward.
If his attacker had also held a sword in his off-hand, it might have been Kwasin’s final action. But the man didn’t, and instead of meeting instant death, Kwasin kneed his assailant in the abdomen with the full force of his downward leap. The man sprawled on his back in the sloping ditch, momentarily stunned, while Kwasin finished him off with a single blow of his ax.
Something whirred past Kwasin’s head as he rose from the corpse. A loud crack came from the monolith above him and small bits of stone showered down upon his head and naked shoulders. Then Kwasin was running for the next monolith. Though the monument he had just jumped from behind was nearer cover, it was not in his nature to remain on the defensive, even against an opponent wielding a sling. He would face his attackers head-on.